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A Sex Writer’s Defense of Visual Porn

Originally published in Good Vibrations Magazine, May 2006. Please note: This post includes information about my personal sexuality; family members and others who don’t want to read about that, please hang up now.

I’ve been writing about sex for over half my adult life. Sex writing makes up the vast majority of my writer’s resume, as well as my professional reputation, and my body of published fiction consists entirely of erotica (a.k.a. smut). I’m an ardent supporter of the burgeoning field of erotic fiction, and a passionate admirer of many of my fellow sex fiction writers. I believe that the last decade or two has seen a remarkable Renaissance in erotic writing, a flowering of first-rate talent both developed within the field and venturing into it from outside. And I feel strongly that erotica is an undervalued genre with tremendous literary potential.

And when it comes to getting off, I want dirty pictures. Or videos. Period. Almost without exception.

I want to talk about why.

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First and foremost, there’s a fundamental problem with sex writing — namely, that I’m unbelievably picky about it. In order for a sex story to get me off, it has to be at least somewhat well-written… and it has to push my own particular erotic buttons. But my own erotic buttons are very particular indeed. My inner masturbator is a fairly devoted sadomasochist, and if a dirty story doesn’t have some element of power or pain, she just doesn’t want to know. I can respect, appreciate, even enjoy sex writing that isn’t about my kinks — but while it may open my mind or tickle my aesthetic fancy, it probably isn’t going to make me reach for my vibrator.

So I need my porn to be kinky — and I need it to be well-written as well. That’s not just snobbery or persnickitiness. Badly written porn is simply less hot. Even if I didn’t care about literary grandeur, I do care about clear images, vivid emotions and sensations. I care about whether the story gets me inside the heads and bodies of the people in the story. I care about imagination, about scenarios that tap into classic sexual iconography without just re-treading it. And I care about writing that, at the very least, doesn’t get in the way, writing that flows smoothly and doesn’t stop the reader mid-sentence to figure out what the hell is going on.

As I weren’t picky enough, my porn fiction doesn’t just have to be well-written and kinky. It also has to be realistic. My libido is almost 100% uninterested in fantasies about sex that couldn’t really happen. Give me a sci-fi smut story about kinky telepaths, or a dirty novel about a kidnap victim who’s raped and tortured but learns to love her submission, and I’ll be flipping the pages so fast it’ll start a dust storm. It’s not that I’ll be upset — I’ll just be bored. I like immediacy in my porn: I like to feel like I’m right there, in the story, like I’m inside the skin of the characters (at least one of them, if not all at once). Or else I like to feel like I’m right there watching, like I’m on the other side of a one-way mirror, drooling over the filthy goings-on and shoving my hand in my pants. And it’s really hard to feel that way if I’m picking holes in the backstory or thinking, “There’s no way she would do that.” I realize this is a personal quirk: I understand that porn is often meant to depict fantasies, not realities, and there’s nothing wrong with unrealistic fantasies. I just don’t get off on them.

All of which makes for a tough sell. Between my need for plausible premises, competent writing, and at least somewhat perverted content, other people’s erotic stories are almost never as hot for me as the ones I come up with in my own head.

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So what’s different about visual porn? Is it any better made? Is it more likely to be kinky, or to be realistic? No, absolutely no, a thousand times no. There’s plenty of thoroughly vanilla imagery in visual porn, plenty of straight-up pictures of people just being naked or having plain old regular sex. There’s plenty of impossible fantasy imagery, especially in dirty drawings and comics. And God knows there’s plenty of unimaginative mediocrity, steaming heaps of unimaginative mediocrity, in sex photos and videos and comics and art.

What’s different about visual porn is that it’s more open to interpretation. There are very few visual erotic images that can’t, in some way, be adapted to fit a wide range of fantasies and preferences and kinks. Take photography, for instance. If the model in a photo is bending over or on her hands and knees, I can imagine that she’s about to be spanked or whipped. If a model is disrobing and not completely nude, I can imagine him being ordered to strip, following precise instructions about what to remove and when, trembling slightly at the voice of the demanding autocrat with the complicatedly specific sexual tastes. Even in the most vanilla, soft-core, soft-focus photos and videos, there’s usually some way to tweak it to fit my kinky brain.

If nothing else, I can imagine some sort of dominance relationship between the photographer and the model (or models). That’s another way that visual porn — photos and videos, anyway — are adaptable. You can project yourself into the scene that the image is depicting… but you can also project yourself into the photo or video session. You can imagine yourself as the model: exposed and vulnerable, or relishing your power over your audience, or subserviently putting yourself in poses to fulfill the photographer’s fetishistic whims. Or you can imagine yourself behind the camera: cool and controlling, or drooling and lecherous, or hungry and worked up with longing for what you can see but aren’t allowed to touch.

All this is true even if your fantasies aren’t as stubbornly kinky as mine. There’s nothing in the story telling you that none of this is really happening. There is no story. You get to make the story up yourself.

But visual porn is obviously not just about making up your own stories. If that were the only appeal, I could happily invent jack-off stories in my head all day long (even more than I already do). There’s something else about a visual image, something that curls itself into a fist and punches me in the gut. What is it?

A lot of it is the immediacy of visual porn, the realism, the ability to make me feel that what’s going on in the porn is real, here and now. This is an area where photos and videos have it all over any other kind of porn. It’s so much easier to feel like dirty pictures or movies are real — because they are real. Photos and videos document real sex acts — real people actually did those things, in the physical world, with their actual bodies. Photos and videos are real in a literal, physical way, which no other porn can match.

But not all visual porn is like that. In stuff like drawing, or painting, or comics and graphic novels, there are no real people. It’s all made up with the artist’s head and hands. It’s no different from fictional porn in that regard: there isn’t anybody who’s really there. And yet dirty drawings — as long as they’re done with a reasonable degree of competence — have almost the same clit-wrenching immediacy for me that dirty photos do.

Besides, the immediacy of visual porn isn’t just about feeling like the people in the pictures are really there. It’s about feeling like I’m really there. The pictures don’t just make it easier for me to imagine the scene — they make it easier for me to project myself into it. Having a picture thrust into my brain makes me feel like I’m there; like I’m one of the people in the scene, or a new person wedging myself into the goings-on, or even an invisible voyeur watching it all up close. And that’s true whether the pictures are photos of real dirty people doing real dirty things, or drawings of dirty people doing made-up dirty things that an artist thought up.

But here’s the weird thing. I’ve been talking to a bunch of people about this question, and people who like dirty stories say exactly the same thing I do about dirty pictures. Fiction is more immediate, they say; it’s less distancing, it makes it easier to project themselves into the scene. I’d always assumed that people who prefer written porn like it in spite of its lack of visceral immediacy — but here these people are, saying that visceral immediacy is exactly what they like about it.

So I’m starting to think that a preference for visual vs. written porn may be hard-wired, just a matter of the way our brains are built from birth. I resisted that idea for a long time, mostly because everything I’d read on that topic was gender-focused in a completely narrow and stupid way: men are wired to get turned on by images, women are wired to get turned on by stories, with all the accompanying “men are from Mars” bullshit about how women just want emotional relationships and men just have dirty minds. I knew that the gender stuff wasn’t true for me, so I’ve tended to dismiss the entire hard-wiring theory. But maybe it has some validity.

It isn’t just about being a “visual person,” though. For one thing, my intense preference for visual erotic art doesn’t translate at all into the non-erotic arts. I’m certainly very fond of visual art; I’ve seen paintings and sculpture and stained glass and such that have moved me nearly to tears. But as a general rule, they don’t have the same death-grip on my brain that books do.

And there’s more overlap between the two forms than I’m letting on. After all, when I look at dirty pictures, one of the first things I do is start making up stories about them. When I masturbate, I usually start with a visual image that’s struck my fancy… but if I’ve hit on an image that packs an unusual punch, I find myself working out who these people are and why they’re there. I think about the dirty things they were doing before they got there, and the even dirtier things they’re going to do next… and soon my mind is slipping around between a whole assortment of images, all within this one story.

Which brings me back around to the big issue: the fact that I’m unbelievably picky about written porn. See, I’m a writer, not a photographer or a filmmaker or a painter. I’m picky about writing because it’s my medium. I know more about writing, both erotic and otherwise, than I do about photography, or filmmaking, or drawing or painting or comics. If I knew more about visual art, I’d probably be a lot more picky about my visual porn. I’d be more familiar with the cliches, more put off by mediocrity, more annoyed by sloppy work. If I were a photographer or something, I might find it a lot harder to look at dirty pictures without my critical reflexes zooming into my forebrain and kicking my libido out of the way. I might find it easier to relax and enjoy dirty stories, just as a consumer, without immediately analyzing them as a professional. And I might well be ranting and musing about why, with a few exceptions, erotic photography is so distancing and hard to identify with, and why erotic fiction packs so much more of a punch.

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7 thoughts on “A Sex Writer’s Defense of Visual Porn”

Just curious – what did you pick _Macho Sluts_ and _Beauty’s Punishment_ to illustrate? The former is some of the hottest S/M writing ever, IMHO, but the realism of the settings isn’t hugely high if you’re going to nit-pick. (I like her McKinnon-esque dystopia story, but it’s not the world I live it.) And the _Beauty_ series doesn’t even try.
I haven’t even _heard_ of _Carrie’s Story_, but if the other two are the company it keeps, perhaps I should remedy that…
I still remember fondly that review of Laura Antoniou by an ardently feminist mag.
“Have rec’d something lurid called _Leatherwomen_, supposedly written by women. Yeah, right. Real women don’t write like that. Or shouldn’t.”

I picked Beauty’s Punishment, Carrie’s Story, and Macho Sluts to illustrate my increasing cascade of pickiness about erotic fiction. I picked Beauty’s Punishment as an example of smut that pushes my erotic buttons (but is only reasonably well-written); Carrie’s Story as an example of smut that pushes my erotic buttons and is very well-written (but depicts an unrealistic fantasy); and Macho Sluts as an example of smut that pushes my erotic buttons, is very well-written, and is (mostly) realistic and plausible. (Califia’s dystopian world isn’t the world we live in, but as futurism goes it’s not implausible; and most of the other stories in this collection are pretty down-to-earth.)
And yes, I do recommend Carrie’s Story. Highly. The world Weatherfield posits isn’t the most plausible one ever, but she does an excellent job of exploring what it might be like for a real person — a smart, thoughtful, interesting real person — to engage with that world. Plus it’s really, really dirty.

I found the following solution to the “stuff that couldn’t really happen” problem: I just fantasize that the scene is being roleplayed. Then it’s a fantasy about people acting out a fantasy. The extra layer makes it plausible but still hot.
I still have the problem of my ethics invading my fantasy life, which is funny but irritating. It makes it impossible for me to fantasize about someone who is in a monogamous relationship without imaging a situation in which it ceases to be morally wrong (wife gives permission, join in, etc).
The worst part is when the ethical issue invades my actual dreams. I mean, how could it hurt anyone for me to DREAM about an unavailable person? But nooooooo…

I guess I’m just hopelessly conventional. Aside from multiple partners I’m not kinky at all. I don’t have any sexual interest in guys. I’ve tried, but it just doesn’t turn me on. I’m not even into heterosexual anal sex, although I’ll do it I’m asked, but I feel like taking a shower afterwards, and if it gets to be a regular thing, I find myself not looking forward to being with that particular partner.
I can’t get rough either. I once had a partner ask me to bite her nipples, which I did, of course, but she kept telling me to do it harder, and it got to a point where I was afraid it was going to actually cause some damage, and I had to stop. It was making MY nipples hurt!
It’s not that I’m unimaginative. I can get very creative about positions and situations. It’s just that when I imagine sex that’s rough or humiliating for either partner, it turns me right off. The two things that turn me on the most are willingness and responsiveness in a partner.
Naturally, these preferences carry over into my preferences for fantasies and visual porn, and that’s a problem. I find that most porno videos, while they may contain a lot of good old meat and potatoes fucking and sucking, also contain a lot of scenes that make me really uncomfortable.
I really hate it that almost every scene ends with the guy jerking off in the girl’s face. I have never had a partner ask me to do that, and I think it would probably gross me out. I also don’t like the way they zoom in on genitalia. I want the whole picture. I want to see how her whole body is responding. I want to see in her face what’s going on in her mind, but I guess that might take some real acting, or just an openness about her natural responses, if there are any.
I’m not that excited by pornographic stills either. Not only do too many of them depict violence, humiliation or acts that I’m not comfortable with, but even when they appear to show willing partners having a great time, I have to wonder if it’s real. Is she really into this, or is she being coerced or slapped around between snaps? And that kind of spoils it for me.
So I have to say that, on the whole, I’ve found commercial porn pretty disappointing when it comes to fantasy material. Just closing my eyes and recalling a recent encounter as vividly as I can, and imagining some possible alternatives that could have happened–and might happen next time–works a lot better for me.
Please understand that I’m not putting it down, and I’m definitely not an advocate of censorship. If it works for you, great, but I guess my sexual tastes are just a little too far out of the mainstream for most of the porn that’s available out there to appeal to me. Even the best I’ve found still doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing.

I, too, have a need for visual pornography; especially S&M and bondage. It is difficult to find partners who have the same tastes as I have and complementary desires, and while I have had partners who have had complementary desires in some aspects, I have been left without satisfaction in others.
For example, in bondage the disciplined and precise ropework that turns takes practice. Many of my partners have been largely excited by my “vanilla” fantasies but only willing to be occasionally tied up in order to fulfill my fantasies. The limits that we agree to are usually less than what turns me on, and not being willing to or interested in violating limits I still need more. Many are the times that I have left a girlfriends house nearly sexually exhausted but still needing to masturbate to stronger B&D than what I just participated in.
Visual porn adds a layer of desire fulfillment, and it is easier to slip into the imaginary role of the Dom participating; and further, not needing to be concerned with the needs of the sub in the scenes my fantasies of complete and total domination are satisfied (kidnap, torture and other darker fantasies) without hurting anyone at all.
As much as I would try to explain that to my partners, they always associated my porn desires for a desire from someone else. They didn’t buy the fact that with the outlet of bondage porn, I was able to maintain my desire for them.
And Buck Fuddy, there is nothing wrong with not liking B&D or S&M or other aspects of desire. You have yours, I have mine. If you don’t find it exciting don’t try to force it.

Very interesting thoughts. I unfortunately don’t have answers, just more questions. I do some writing, but I am also a photographer, and I do describe myself as “a visual person”. This may be true in general, but is especially true when it comes to sexual arousal. In fact, it’s my interest in visual depictions of sexuality that drew me to erotic photography in the first place. And yet, no matter how much I learn about photography, or how much of it I am exposed to, it (and visual stimuli in general) remains my primary source of arousal.
I do wonder about the “men are visual, women are imaginative” stereotype. You seem to be an exception, but this definitely appears to be a common trend. I don’t know if it’s more biological, or a result of self-perpetuating social roles, but that’s a question I’d love to know the answer to. The bottom line is, when I shoot erotic photography with a male model, I get a huge gay male audience, and very few women (at least who make themselves known). Are the women hiding because they’re not interested, or because they’re afraid to admit their interest, or because they’ve convinced themselves that they couldn’t possibly be interested? I wish I knew.
I suppose this could also relate to the “women are not allowed to admit they like sex” issue.

Are the women hiding because they’re not interested, or because they’re afraid to admit their interest, or because they’ve convinced themselves that they couldn’t possibly be interested? I wish I knew.
I don’t know either, but it might be because, in certain venues, they are not comfortable admitting it? My personal (and admittingly anedcdotal) experience, though, is that many women are absolutely interested in looking at sexy people!
I think that in many cases it’s not so much a ‘men likes visuals – women doesn’t’-difference, but that many women doesn’t much care for the same style of visuals that many men like.
My personal preference are skinnier long haired men, for example, if more erotic photographers would take more photos of such guys in erotic situations, rather than the more common hunky, big muscled, short haired kind of man, I would have much more visuals to enjoy!
I’m a woman who love visual erotica as much as I like written one. It’s just a question of finding something that appeals to my taste.

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